Visiting a château outside Paris last Christmas, I stepped from a fire-warmed room to find the corridor in commotion. A cascade of kids, in frilly blue and green costumes, came rumbling and tumbling down the stone-slab stairs. On a festive club outing of some kind, the girls and boys in their fancy dress radiated excitement. There was the clack of their heels hurriedly meeting each step, the slap of little palms against thick walls, and the froufrou of flappy outfits as they raced and tussled good-naturedly. And intermingled with all of that, something like the burble of collective physical presence, of many simultaneous intakes and outtakes of breath. “They can be so noisy,” muttered a middle-aged woman beside me. Yet among the group not a word was spoken. Not one shout or shriek. Then it dawned on me that they were deaf children; and, later, on my way out, passing through the grounds in the wintry gloom, I crossed them again, huddled now with their caregivers beneath a street lamp, their busy fingers conversing.
La langue des signes française, the children’s sign language—for it most definitely is a language, complete with syntax and morphology and slang—is one of many: every continent has its own distinct forms. But France can claim sign language as England claims English (that more famous global export). A Frenchman, Laurent Clerc, was instrumental in the creation of America’s first school for the deaf, in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817. The system of gestures and facial expressions Clerc brought to the United States had been learned as a boy in Paris, according to methods devised by one Abbot de l’Épée in the mid-1700s. In Yankee hands, the result would become ASL, American Sign Language, which in turn fed several of the forms used widely today across Africa and Asia. So it was that the French, they of the Gallic shrug, as famous as their Italian cousins for the expressivity of their bodies, taught the world to sign.
ASL’s quirks, with their roots in the games and garments, the duels and ideas of eighteenth-century France, can mystify the observer. Why do the signs for tomorrow (literally, “one [day] into the future”) and yesterday (literally, “one [day] into the past”) enlist the thumb? Because the French count one on the thumb and not, as do Americans, on the index. The thumb that flicks out from under the chin to mean not in ASL, is the French child’s still-popular signal of defiance. Cannot, the right index striking down against the left, mimics the sort of swordfights of which Europe’s noblemen were once so fond. And if you rightly see a reference to the head in government—in which the index lands on the signer’s temple—it is only half an explanation: the hand carrying the index first rotates, perhaps drawing the revolutionaries’ tricolor cockade.
I was in Montreal, then in Ottawa to see family, some months after that château visit; and, since my aunt spoke French and would have seen deaf patients during her many years at the local hospital’s rehabilitation service, I shared my interest in ASL’s origins with her. I had even prepared an anecdote (which Emily Shaw and Yves Delaporte recount in one of their Sign Language Studies papers), of American commentators interpreting stupid—the peace or “V” sign raised to the forehead—all wrong; they claim it represents prison bars that curtail the mind. The gesture, in fact, emulates horns and for a very good French reason: bête can mean “stupid” but also “beast.”
I never did get round to telling my aunt, Margo Flah, the anecdote. I did not need to. In her youth, she said, she had learned to sign ASL conversations while working at U.S. centers for the deaf. On moving to Canada, she could be seen signing the evening news on television. Car crashes and parliamentary speeches and lottery millions passed through her fingers. People would come up to her in the street. It was a whole side of her I had never known.
Margo offered to teach me the signs of the alphabet. She sat me opposite her at one end of the long table in the living room; and, following her lead, I closed the fingers of my left hand flat over the palm. “A,” she said. Then my hand, mirroring hers, contorted into a B, a C, a D, an E, an F. “Wait!” She broke off. “Are you left-handed?” ASL users, she told me, normally sign with their dominant hand. I write right-handedly, but for some reason, have always thrown with my left. So the choice of hand seemed to depend on the nature of signs: were they something like objects that you pitch through the air, or more like calligraphy, with the space around your body for paper and your hand and arm for brush? I decided to switch to my writing hand. Margo looked relieved. She continued, letter by letter, on through the Zorro-like flourish of Z. Her kindness, her patience, made an enthusiastic student of me. Several times, we ran through the gamut and lingered over those letters my hand did not get quite right. How sharp the practiced signer’s eye is! Fingers a fraction too low over the bent thumb formed an inadequate E. The fist of S needed to be a little tighter. Too much bending of the index spoiled the X. Once or twice, leaning over the table, Margo took my hand in hers and gently adjusted my fingers as though setting the time on a slow watch.
“I have two friends you should really meet,” Margo said after we had finished signing the alphabet. She invited them round to the house, some mornings later, for coffee and cake.
Notwithstanding his French name, Michel David was raised in an English-speaking Ottawa household. He was a bright-eyed man in his early sixties. He wore Russian green trousers, a checkered shirt beneath a beige sweater, a trim white beard, and, in his left ear, a cochlear implant device.
Monica Elaine Campbell, a few years younger than Michel, was tanned and stylish in a blue-and-white silk scarf, matching blouse, and denim skirt. Her wrists jangled with bracelets, and on the fingers of both hands she had several gold rings. Unlike Michel with his device, she could not hear. She read my lips when I spoke.
We sat around the plate-laden table, in a warm smell of brewing coffee—Michel and Monica Elaine side by side, facing me, with their backs to the window and the bright April sun. Such preliminaries assured Monica Elaine adequate light to see every movement my face and mouth made. Carefully, without hurry, I articulated my words, first of introduction, then of questions for them; in response, Michel and Monica Elaine used ASL (the prevailing sign language in Anglophone Canada) and spoken English.
Michel said, “I’m small-d deaf,” meaning he did not consider himself culturally deaf; he did not have ASL as his first language. Hearing loss ran in the family, though. As a small boy sitting in the kitchen, he saw his grandmother’s cousin communicate in gestures. Around the same time, he noticed that he had a toddler’s sense of balance; he had to gaze at a fixed point in the distance as he approached it in order to keep himself plumb. (At night, the lights out, if he ventures to the bathroom without his device he says he stumbles along the landing “like a drunk.”) He lay in bed for hours and felt his ears ache. At nine, it seemed to him his parents were always stepping out of his earshot. Forty-decibel loss, the audiologist told them. And that was only the beginning. The son’s earshot grew narrower and narrower by the year. Voices, even the loudest, even the most familiar, became patchworks of guesses and memory. In his teens, he turned to ASL; he attended evening classes. Then, one afternoon, while cutting his parents’ grass, he heard his ears pop and then nothing. “I thought the mower had died on me.” He was twenty. It was the beginning of thirty years in total deafness.
Michel’s face was turned toward Monica Elaine as he spoke. She watched his brisk, fluent signs; read the accompanying expressions on his face; and, when he had finished, nodded at the gesture for her to begin. To take a turn. The pouring of pepping coffee, the slicing of aromatic cake, were understandably distracting; and it is considered rude, Michel added, to sign with your hands full.
Monica Elaine was prelingually deaf: her deafness had been discovered at fifteen months. But her parents did not want their daughter to acquire sign language—that would have meant either having to learn ASL as a family or else packing the infant off to a distant school for signing children, and neither option seemed acceptable. So Monica Elaine stayed put with her hearing siblings—three brothers and one sister (a future teacher of the deaf in the United States)—amid the picturesque quays and harbors of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
Presently a new school opened on the island, a school for the lip-reading and speaking deaf. Monica Elaine’s parents took the John Tracy Clinic correspondence course to prepare to send their daughter there. They acted on advice from Los Angeles (Spencer Tracy, John’s father, was the clinic’s main benefactor). The advice was straightforward enough: speak to your deaf child in slow, complete sentences; include her in the everyday life of the family; treat her like any other inquisitive little girl. They followed these principles to the letter, making Monica Elaine fully “speech ready” for when school started. When she was four, it did. In front of a mirror she was taught to form letters in her mouth: the p on the lips, the t by raising the tip of her tongue to the palate, the h by misting the glass with her exhaled breath. Touch—a nervous hand raised to the teacher’s cheek and throat—communicated good pronunciation. Little by little the pupil acquired her soft, measured voice.
Monica Elaine’s voice is pleasant, easy to understand. Rare are the occasions when she drops a sound from a word (“migle” instead of mingle), or replaces one for another (“cazier” for cashier). And yet behind the ease lay much personal pain. Growing up, she felt herself “teetering between two worlds,” unsure of her identity. Her childhood confusion turned to an adult’s anger at not being on signing terms with so many of her peers. Deeply she regretted that her brain had been made to resemble that of a hearing person’s. One day, she resolved to study ASL. Never too late to learn. She was thirty-seven.
What courage and perseverance! And it became clear as the morning went on how hard Michel and Monica Elaine had had to fight to lead full lives. They grew up at a time when the attention given to deaf adults’ talents and aptitudes was small. Both had nonetheless found in themselves sufficient reserves of determination and self-belief to earn degrees and launch careers.
Michel: “People saw me as a gardener. I had a diploma in horticulture. But then I thought, wait, I can do more. I have a mind. I remembered reading a James Michener novel, The Source. The story opens on an archaeological dig in Israel. I got the dollars together and flew to Tel Aviv. I was twenty-one. I spent three months on a kibbutz. Then I took a boat to Cyprus and Greece. I hitchhiked everywhere: through what was then Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland. When I was done with Europe, I flew with a Soviet carrier to Japan. I was there several months.”
“Did you use sign language with your hosts?”
“Yes. That’s the great thing about signing, wherever you are you can usually make yourself understood. And I found foreigners in general to be much more patient with a deaf person.”
The experience emboldened him to pursue academic studies on his return home. “The hardest course for me was French. I was forever mixing up the meanings of entendre and comprendre.” After a bachelor’s degree in psychology, he moved to Toronto to obtain a master’s in social work, started a support group for deaf adults there in 1986, and later became a mental health counselor with the Canadian Hearing Society.
Monica Elaine: “The professors at my university would sometimes walk up and down as they gave their lectures, which made it impossible to lip-read what they were saying.” During one of these, the professor spoke for two hours, pacing up and down before garish striped wallpaper: the “visual noise” was uncomfortably loud. And yet she persevered. Mathematics and biology, “very visible subjects,” allowed her to play to her strengths. She went on to a long career in human resources.
“At around the time I learned to sign I became involved in palliative care for the deaf.” Too ill to write, many deaf patients were deprived of the comfort of communicating with family and friends. She went from hospital to hospital, from deathbed to deathbed, interpreting patients’ last signs, reading bloodless lips. For this, in February 2016, Monica Elaine was invested into the Order of Ontario, the province’s highest civilian honor.
Michel and Monica Elaine had something else in common, I learned. Their respective partners are hearing. Communication within the couples consists of a mix of speech and signs. Michel is a father of five: all are native signers. “Their first sign, at around ten months, is ‘milk.’” He clenched his fist. “Like this. Like pulling an udder. They use it to mean ‘food.’ They point to milk, crackers, juice and use the same sign. It goes to show how early signing babies can generalize and develop concepts.”
Michel had his cochlear implant operation twelve years ago, at 49. His life changed. “My daughter Jessica was three. What a joy to hear her crying!”
He could jump at a clap of thunder, thrill at classical music, or savor the quiet of deaf meetings. But the implant, he acknowledged, is considered a threat in many quarters of the culturally deaf—the big-D Deaf—community. Some fret that it encroaches on their way of life, threatens Deaf pride, undermines the use of sign. Michel, though, did not think in terms of either/or. He considered himself multilingual. He knew the Deaf culture (as did Monica Elaine), for which he had respect. “They are very honest. Honest to the point of bluntness. If you have put on weight since they last saw you, they will sign that you look fatter. At the same time, they won’t come right out with their problems. They will tell them within a story.”
And Michel and Monica Elaine could understand the Deaf community’s vigilance, its desire to cherish all that made sign language so distinctive.
Monica Elaine said, “For instance, to say something like, ‘have you ever been to New York?’ you use the signs for New York, touch, finish, and question.”
She signed them for me. To express question, the signer’s index bends and points in the direction of the person being asked. The upper body also leans forward. ASL grammar, Monica Elaine continued, expanding, is spatial. For instance, leaning forward can also mean the signer is describing something that will happen; likewise, leaning back can indicate that the talk is of what is already in the past. If the signer leans a little to the right (assuming the signer is right-handed), the other person knows that whatever is being signed about occurred only a matter of minutes ago.
One hour conversing with Monica Elaine and Michel grew into two, then three. We were surprised when our host, my aunt, told us. We had not seen the time pass.
I raised the fingertips of my open right palm to my chin and lowered them in the direction of Monica Elaine and Michel, recalling a sign Margo had taught me at the same table several days before. I was thanking them: for the morning in their company, for all that they had taught me about ASL, and for so much more besides.